Like Breath, Like Air

Oh, for fuck's sake when I die, don’t tell them I was full of lifesay instead, that I was airand that I swept through the valley of the damnedin the deadest places of the earthlike a hurricane or a soft breeze;the details are not important.If you are feeling generous, say instead that I was wise, but a half-prophet at bestwho wandered, stiff-kneed, under southern Suns through bruised and ebbing citieswhich are just another kind of wasteland.

Remind them of who I was: listlesswretchedspoiling like the hot weight of the un-wind in the Negev where I once drank cool, sweet water in a Bedouin tentunder the cruel eye of a kind Canaanite King whose gentle, clay hands resemble my father's.

Tell them that I wanted to die, even when I didn’tbecause sometimes I did.

And then forgive me this last weaknesswrought of restless living; but to rest somewherethe endless soul of a dumb bone graveyard - what bliss!To slide un-designed through ancient terracotta fingerswith such easy softness, tiny callous particles warping into glassy waves beneath the shoreline a thousand little certainties of sandlike breathlike air. ​

Crying Shame

We never knew they was coming until it was too late.1982 was when they came. We had always just minded our business quietly and contently.​Every month or so a new tenant would join us. Not near me, ‘course. Robert Dalton was to my left and little Timmy Johnson on my right. He was only thirteen-years-old. Crying shame, I always say. But it happens and there is nothing we could do about it.​